Sunday April 19, 2009
Wolverine, the conspiracy
Popculture Venture: By ELIZABETH TAI
Starting this week, Elizabeth Tai, a rabid consumer of television and film in various languages, meets readers in an occasional column called Popculture Vulture, where she praises or rages at the latest showbiz affairs.
IT’S the kind of story Hollywood didn’t need in recession-strapped times:
X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the blockbuster that was supposed to start the wave of 2009 summer movies, was leaked online on March 31 – a month before its world premiere. (It hits screens in Malaysia on April 29.)
This, understandably, made 20th Century Fox
very unhappy. Not only was the cat let out of the bag far too early, Fox risked losing millions of dollars in ticket sales to downloaders who might decide not to watch it in the cinemas. Not good news to Fox, who had reportedly sunk more than US$100mil (RM360mil) into the film. Infuriated, the studio promised tough legal action and got the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Motion Picture Association of America on the case.
Equally incensed was the leading actor Hugh Jackman, who not only spent months beefing up for his role as Wolverine, but acted as producer for it. He was reportedly “heartbroken” over the theft.
The only good thing in this messy affair is that the leaked copy was an unfinished version sans special effects and reshoots.
But millions have since downloaded the movie via peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, and there is no stopping them from writing a review of it in hundreds of blogs and forums or nudging friends and relatives to avoid the movie. Will bad word of mouth tank
Wolverine before it leaves the starting line? A month is far too long for bad buzz to circulate and percolate through the Internet.
Quite a prickly pickle for Fox, indeed.
Hugh Jackman at the presentation of X-Men Origins: Wolverine in Madrid, Spain, on April 15. The Australian actor/producer was ‘heartbroken’ over the recent leak of the movie on the Internet. – AFP
Reading online comments about the whole fiasco was certainly entertaining.
“This is karma, Fox, for what you did to
Watchmen!” howled a user named “barradel” on the Internet website IGN’s message boards, referring to the Fox vs Warner Bros lawsuit which threatened to delay
Watchmen’s premiere to 2010 instead of its March 2009 release.
Others, such as popular entertainment website Ain’t It Cool News, were kinder, saying that it was unfair that
Wolverine was not given a fair shot in the cinemas, and that they will most certainly not download the movie.
However, the conspiracy theorists among the lot believe that it was Fox that leaked the unfinished version. They theorised: It had to be an inside job as security was always super tight. Perhaps
Wolverine was so bad that Fox needed to get the buzz going with a sensational story about a theft, an online leak and FBI involvement. What better way to usher viewers into the cinema but with a scandal that will make its way to newspapers around the world?
But seeing how much is at stake here (namely, millions of dollars in revenue), that theory can barely hold water. After all, we’re not talking about a D-movie being promoted as a blockbuster here.
Wolverine is an offspring of the highly successful
X-Men franchise, and say what you will about the third offering, the abysmally disappointing
X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006, but the fact remains that the three
X-Men movies grossed more than US$1bil (RM3.6bil) worldwide.
And then there’s the pre-release buzz from fans.When Hugh Jackman unveiled the
Wolverine trailer for the first time in San Diego’s Comic Con in July last year, the crowd went crazy and then literally screamed with delight when a much-loved
X-Men character (from the comics), Gambit, appeared in the trailer.
Simply put, this is a much-anticipated movie, and it doesn’t just have fan appeal but mass market draw as well. It doesn’t seem logical that Fox would want to shoot itself in the foot in such a spectacular fashion.
But then I read Roger Friedman’s article on the column
Fox 411, which appeared almost immediately after news of the leak broke out. (It was deleted soon after.) A columnist on Foxnews.com, Friedman wrote that downloading
Wolverine was “so much easier than going out in the rain”and that the movie “exceeds expectations at every turn”.
Wait, what? Not only does he
admit to illegally downloading a movie (“Hello, FBI, come and get me!”), he works for a sister company of 20th Century Fox (both companies under Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation).
Seriously, no sane entertainment journalist would commit such a crazy faux pas (and Friedman has been a journalist for over a decade) ... unless he was given some kind of “blessing” ... and it was a rather glowing review too.
Hmm!
Then Friedman was fired.
Fox said in a statement: “We’ve just been made aware that Roger Friedman, a freelance columnist who writes
Fox 411 on Foxnews.com – an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox – watched on the Internet and reviewed a stolen and unfinished version of
X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This behaviour is reprehensible and we condemn this act categorically – whether the review is good or bad.”
And this fuelled numerous “what was he thinking?” blog posts as surfers try to wrap around Friedman’s motives, and Fox’s actions. But the conspiracy theorists are not satisfied. Shouldn’t Friedman, an experienced entertainment journalist, know better?
The answer may not truly emerge or truly satisfy, but all this buzz about
Wolverine certainly wouldn’t hurt. Especially since upcoming summer titans like
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, J.J. Abrams’
Star Trek and
Terminator Salvation seem to be stealing
Wolverine’s thunder of late!
>
Elizabeth Tai doesn’t understand why people would waste time with an unfinished copy of ‘Wolverine’ and not wait to see the superhero in full glory in the cinema. She welcomes views from both detractors and supporters.
AP
